Toxic Motel (Indonesian, b. 1992),,known as Tomo,is a multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in Jakarta,who works across digital glitch art and acrylic painting.He began working with glitch art in 2013, after a malfunction while encoding a video file at a production house, an accident he describes as giving him a mindset of “the beauty of destruction”.
For Toxic Motel, the process behind a piece matters as much as the final image, distinguishing true glitch art from work that merely looks glitchy.His influences include 1920s surrealism, 1960s psychedelic art, 1980s Stephen King book covers, and 1990s colour aesthetics. He begins each piece with pen and journal, writing poetry and doodling, before developing the concept into visuals in Photoshop and manipulating them with glitch techniques in video software.Across his work he applies techniques including datamoshing, pixel sorting, and slit scanning, an analogue process dating to 1960s camera work that he combines with modern software.
His music video Grand Inc. - She Never Saw Me Jammin threads these effects through recurring imagery, including a sunrise dissolving into traffic, a koi fish blooming into a lily, and a ballerina's movements echoing the ocean. In Dream Mapping he uses slit scanning directly, while Flowery Does Not Call Me layers a subtle datamosh glitch over a floating skull whose clock hands appear frozen in time.He also creates visuals for musicians' music videos, including The Way Down (2020 Version), made with the musician WAX//WANE.As part of the Freestyle Production Studio Sinaracun, he has collaborated on audio-visual work with Pemuda Sinarmas.
He held his first solo exhibition, at Tokonoma in Jakarta, in 2020.,His group exhibitions include the “Frame of Mind” show at Third Eye Space in Jakarta in 2019, the “De:Formal Digital Art Biennale” in New York in 2019, and “Anthology of Metaverse Exhibition 1.0” in Kuala Lumpur in 2021.In April 2021 he invited followers on Instagram to try slit scanning using a scanner or printer, a project he called Tech Abuser that drew around 35 participants.In 2022 he contributed the piece Tiny Mustache Living Ego to a Tezos charity collection supporting Ukraine.
